Four short links: 19 November 2018

Time is Partial -- Even though time naturally feels like a total order, studying distributed systems or weak memory exposes you, head on, to how it isn’t. And that’s precisely because these are both cases where our standard over-approximation of time being total limits performance—which we obviously can’t have.

How I Lost and Regained Control of My Microchip Implant (Vice) -- After a year of living with a totally useless NFC implant, I kind of started to like it. That small, almost imperceptible little bump on my left hand was a constant reminder that even the most sophisticated and fool-proof technologies are no match for human incompetence. (via Slashdot)

Nat Torkington has been active in web development since the early days of the web. He wrote the bestselling Perl Cookbook, and chaired conferences for O'Reilly Media for a decade. During his time at O'Reilly Media, Nat was an editor and then became a trend-spotter for the O'Reilly Radar group, identifying the topics to build events and books around. He has worked in areas as diverse as networking, publishing, science, edtech, and NLP. He now lives in New Zealand, where he runs Kiwi Foo Camp and helps startups grow.